If you’re going to play your own game, then you better make sure you hold a tight leash on where your marketing funds are going. Gone are the days of aimlessly spending all kinds of money toward campaigns that don’t deliver a decent ROI. You’ll need to be meticulous about what you’re getting out of your spending, er, excuse us… investments.
Want to actually invest? Invest in your own confidence to do what works for you. Ignore everyone else who try to convince you to “invest” in their program. Once we joined this amazing marketing program that promised a lead-generating funnel system. They helped us build our website, gave us coaching, helped us develop graphics, branding, and sales pitches. Things were going great until bam, we decided we wanted to try a new approach. This company would not accept it. We had to follow their guidelines and that was final. So, we said we will take our work in our own hands and try this without them.
One particularly important piece we missed when signing on was that if we ever, EVER, cancelled with them, we’d lose Every. Single. Thing.
And we did. We lost our website, all our content, our logo, and there was no way of ever producing anything similar or else, you know, lawsuit. So, we started from scratch. We lost one whole year of work, and “investments” because we let someone else run the show. You do not want to get yourself into this kind of bind, the one where you give up 100% autonomy and control.
In a game, your goal is to win. You want to use ethics, of course, and win fairly. If you don’t, you still lose because you didn’t gain any skills in the process or level up. So, level up by winning little-by-little, with an occasional big win. It happens. Still, you are in control of your moves and your strategies.
Sure, you could create a video with AI and make it look like you’re the one in charge while sitting behind a keyboard, but that again, does not level you up. No matter how many people tell you, “If you’re not in with AI then you’re obsolete.” Wrong! If you’re not leveling yourself up (like the actual human that you are) then we say you’re obsolete… eventually. Yes, all empires must come to an end. We’d rather build ourselves up and win in the end. To do that, we need to be in control. Last thing we want is to fork over all our control to a program that promises quick wins and fast money. We’re here for the long game.
So, if you want to win, you need to have patience and consistency. You need to catch yourself if you even for one second start to think that you need to invest every bit of control over to a larger company. That’s not winning. That’s temporarily giving away your time and money to someone else without leveling up what you need to.
So how can you keep control?
- Invest in only what you absolutely need, like a tool or software, that helps further YOU along in your marketing efforts.
- Identify the core skills in each of your team members and invest in building them.
- Constantly have discussions or ask yourself questions about where you’re at and where you want to go – see how aligned you are at meeting your goals and what needs to shift.
- Keep detailed logs, graphs, charts, whatever, about every marketing campaign you run and see if you’re getting more bang for your buck.
In other words, micromanage the heck out of every marketing effort you put out and that does include your team members. You need to monitor how much you’re spending and what you’re getting in return. If you see that you’re spending $1000 every month but getting $100 back, something needs to change. Seeing a drop in ROI doesn’t necessarily mean you need to cut that strategy out, but it could indicate that something wrong is going on. Maybe the person managing that campaign isn’t putting forth effort, or maybe they’re stuck and are afraid to tell you.
It’s complex, yes. Truly, the bottom line (in this case, the money) isn’t enough to tell you if a campaign is working or not. Sometimes you need to complete another step. In the example above, that would mean you could benefit from sitting with your team member and asking what’s going on. If they’re superior and doing all that they can, then second guess that campaign. If they admit they’ve slacked or are confused, see about training them or delegating the task to someone else.
Keep in control. Baby every campaign. Monitor, track, and judge everything about them. That’s how you win the game.
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